Historically, there seems to have been as many ways to teach singing as there are singing instructors. All too often the teaching methods are subjective, differ from one student to the next, and focus on finer points of technique before the fundamentals of proper vocalization are established in the student. Consequently, achieving good results has been hit or miss, such that some students appear to innately have what it takes to sing properly and others do not.
Singing begins with proper embouchure mechanics. With respect to this disclosure, embouchure is defined as the positioning and movement of the tongue, mouth, lips (including musculature of the face around the lips back to the “smile lines,” as shown in FIGS. 1-3), and the teeth or jaw, for vocalization. Embouchure affects the fullness, volume, roundness, richness, and projection of a singer's voice. Proper embouchure mechanics position and shape the lips, mouth, jaw and concomitantly the teeth, the oral cavity, and the column from the back of the mouth to the larynx to optimize the sound and delivery of the voice.
Embouchure is distinct from phonetics. Phonetics generally relates to particular speech sounds and their reproduction. A person may enunciate a particular phonetic sound and be readily understood with or without proper embouchure of the mouth. The traditional means of representing phonetics do not represent or instruct proper embouchure of the mouth, especially proper embouchure for singing. In fact, a singer may reproduce a given phoneme perfectly from a linguistic perspective but still be singing far below her natural capabilities, because she is not using proper embouchure to optimize her vocal instrument.
While the importance of proper embouchure has been recognized, there has not been an effort to identify, classify, and represent proper embouchure mechanics such that it may be taught in a systematic manner to achieve consistent and repeatable results. Likewise, there is no system for visually representing proper embouchure mechanics such that a singer can read the proper embouchure for a given word or sound, just as a guitar player can read finger charts and know the proper finger positioning on the fret board for a given chord.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for defining proper embouchure mechanics for vocalization and for representing those mechanics symbolically, such that proper embouchure can be taught consistently and can be read and executed by a vocalist in real time while performing a piece of music.